Time-of-Travel Methods for Measuring Optical Flow on Board a Micro Flying Robot

For use in autonomous micro air vehicles, visual sensors must not only be small, lightweight and insensitive to light variations; on-board autopilots also require fast and accurate optical flow measurements over a wide range of speeds. Using an auto-adaptive bio-inspired Michaelis-Menten Auto- adaptive Pixel (M(2)APix) analog silicon retina, in this article, we present comparative tests of two optical flow calculation algorithms operating under lighting conditions from 6 X 10(-7) to 1.6 X 10(-2) W.cm(-2) (i. e., from 0.2 to 12,000 lux for human vision). Contrast time of travel between two adjacent light-sensitive pixels was determined by thresholding and by cross- correlating the two pixels' signals, with measurement frequency up to 5 kHz for the 10 local motion sensors of the M2APix sensor. While both algorithms adequately measured optical flow between 25 degrees/s and 1000 degrees/s, thresholding gave rise to a lower precision, especially due to a larger number of outliers at higher speeds. Compared to thresholding, cross-correlation also allowed for a higher rate of optical flow output (99 Hz and 1195 Hz, respectively) but required substantially more computational resources.